DKFL

I just finished ear-booking a memoir Eyewitness: The Rise and Fall of Dorling Kindersley by Christopher Davis. In a first for me, it was read by a voice-bot; but it would have been hard to determine this from the aural evidence alone. It had about the same number of egregious mispronunciations as the, like, people they employ to create audio-books.

In our pantheon of the Saints of Kapital, Peter Kindersley ranks second only to Sir Clive "ZX81" Sinclair, [of whom multiprev].  We were distantly aware of Dorling Kindersley as a publisher of gorgeous glossy informative non-fiction for families. Dau.I and Dau.II were born in 1993 and 1995 and by 1996 we joined Sa Bhaile [At Home] a community of woo-folk [a lorra Birkenstocks and rice-cakes] who chose intentionally to keep their kids out of school.  In 1998, The Education Welfare Bill threatened to regularize Home Education in Ireland. Some of us in Sa Bhaile had a [interminable] series of meetings to create a new more structured disorganization; the better to fight or divert The Man from interfering in our version of educating kids at home. It was quite heady as we decided to organize the first conference sponsored by our nascent Home Education Network HEN.

Around this time, The Beloved went to London for a meeting [AGM??] of Education Otherwise EO, the well-established British equivalent  of HEN. The key-note speaker was Peter Kindersley, riding high on a direct selling pyramid scheme venture called Dorling Kindersley Family Learning. The business model for DKFL was for wannabee thousandaires to host DKFL jamborees at their homes - think Tupperware Parties for heavily discounted books, CDs and other merch. After his talk, TB barrelled up to him and said how inspiring DKFL was . . . and would DK like to sponsor the launch of HEN across the water in Ireland. Kindersley answered positively in a way that was not just "ho ho an untapped market". But businesslike, he asked for a business plan and proposal to be sent to his PA. 

Within a month a personal cheque for £2,000 had been lodged in the HEN bank account! In those far-off days, £2K was enough to cover all the upfront costs of running the 1st HEN Conference in Newtown School in 1999. That conference broke even - turning a modest profit from The Raffle. The Peter Kindersley Memorial Fund was rolled over to float the 2nd Conference in 2000AD. And so on! That subsidy enabled HEN to stagger on from year to year without requiring any Effective to raise funds for the major expense of the HEN financial year. Which was just as well because the HEN community was long on visionaries but short on grunts. So long and thanks for all the fi$h, Mr Kindersley.

The Beloved also signed up to be a "Presenter" for DKFL which didn't make us hundredaires let alone thousandaires but did allow us to acquire dozens and dozens of books at cost-price ad maiorem edu glossiem of our girls:  

The title of Christopher Davis' book Eyewitness is a reference to the long series of Eyewitness Guides whc fill the bottom right corner of the picture above: Sea Life; Mammals; Sports; Plants; Transport; Your Body; Space etc.. Those DK books formed the core resource for Dau.I and Dau.II to educate themselves from the comfort of their own sofa.

Davis was the 2nd Hire when Dorling and Kindersley launched DK at the Annual Frankfurt Book Fair in 1976. He was therefore witness to [and co-cause of] the Rise and Rise of DK through the 80s and 90s as they launched a string of million copy best sellers including John Seymour's Self-sufficiency which got us where we are today. Davis was "let go" just before DK imploded spectacularly by investing in millions and millions of unsellable items of Star Wars merch in 1999. The book is wry, funny and a good lens on booze, deals, hubris and humility. The bare bones of DK's history and timeline is captured here.